Welcome to yet another post about foldy, flying, bladed implements… Yes, it’s another glaive post. No, ya cheeky little ninny, I have not run out of material to blog (believe you me!). It’s just how my freaky, little, mildly OC mind works; it tends to follow any given track to exhaustion… Don’t worry, I think this will be the last glaive. At least for now… I think… MUA HA HA Ha ha ha ha ha haaa…! Pfft..! Y’all are no fun.

But anyway back to the topic at hand. This glaive is special. Special primarily because I think I could actually convert this design for contemporary throwing weapon use without too much mechanical head banging. Not to mention that it is also the most powerful glaive (in all glaivedom… LOL… heh…) to ever grace the silver screen. I give you the glaive of Prince Colwyn of the movie Krull.

The Krull Glaive

In the movie Krull, the protagonist (Prince Colwyn) wielded a mystical weapon called the Glaive (of course!). Now from a practical and mechanical stand point, I think this glaive is perhaps the best designed weapon of the three distinct designs we have looked at so far, though a bit on the gaudy side for my tastes. It was a five legged design, each blade being deployed in a “out-the-front” switchblade style from each leg when in action, and retracting into the leg when stowed.

This design allowed for it to be thrown by holding any one of the legs, which, being offset from the center of the weapon, allowed greater control than any of the other glaive designs we have seen so far. One big advantage with this design is that I think one could incorporate a centrifugally actuated mechanism to make the blades deploy while in flight, making it easier (and safer for the little piggly wigglies) to throw.

The design of each double edged pointed blade was also well thought out, down to the angle at which they exited the glaive, so that it could easily be thrown with the intention of cutting its target without sticking, or so that it would “dig in” and stick on contact.

Now in the movie, the protagonist could control this thing mentally so that it acted like a freakin’ remote controlled frisby of death, but, much to my chagrin, I’m quite sure I would find myself unable to replicate this behavior in a replica weapon. However, assuming due attention was paid to maximizing the internal structural support the each blade, and also that the deployment and retention mechanisms were mechanically robust, this blade would fly circles around the other two designs.

Now I have already mentioned that I am not a big fan of the surface aesthetics of it’s design. The bright colors and flashy gems give it a much too gaudy air. However this glaive gets my vote, hands down, as the weapon I would be most likely to pick up, were I given a choice between this, the BeastMasters Caber or Blades Shredder. I’d have to pop out the shiny stuff, pointy the points a bit, sharpen the lines a tad and powder coat it black though…

18 Responses to “My Favorite Glaive.”

Thanks for all these glaive posts. I just bought the master cutlery “cyclone” glaive that you covered in another post. It r so cool! Plus, it wAs only 10 bucks where I got it! Can’t wait until I get a chance to throw it at my archery target. Unfortunately, my parents don’t know I bought it :} you wouldn’t happen to know a proper throwing technique would you?

@Koroso
Proper throwing technique for a Cyclone?? No, I don’t even believe there *is* a proper throwing technique for that particular weapon. You could technically hold it by one of the blades and throw it in an overhand fashion like a shuriken… But those things are really not realistically designed for throwing. My advice? Don’t throw it at all..

@Niccolo
You are correct, these weapons are technically not “glaives”, at least not in the medieval historic sense. If you look at my very first Glaive post, you’ll see that i make the distinction…

The term Glaive now has an additional meaning inferred upon it by hollywood, to describe a variety of multi bladed hand held throwing implement…

@Crosseyes
Actually, the Dictionary.com definition is a less commonly used reference. It is more commonly used to refer to the polearm. However the term has been appropriated by the movie industry to refer to weapons like these, perhaps because the earlier use of the word, whose root is in the latin Gladius, was a more poetic way of saying sword…

I guess Hollywood figured that there was poetry in the idea of a spinning, flying, boomerang like blade, and decided to apply the term Glaive to them…

This blog is syndicated by Google news? Huh! Well that’s news to me… 🙂 Honestly, I have no idea how anybody picks this blog up anymore… Maybe a wordpress.com thing… I dunno.

I just started this blog to write about something I enjoy… It’s cool to see that people are enjoying it too though… Thanks!

Archery greats… Well we’ll see… I don’t have any expansive experience in that area, apart from a little personal archery experience and some interesting historic tidbits, but I’ll keep it in mind for a future topic…

Lol, archery is one of my favorite topics. I’d love to get back into it. Phyreblade, I found your blog by accident while searching the topic of Glaives actually :). And I find your ability to make up new words on the go, if not the words themselves very amusing man.

I tend to think of this Baroque badboy as the original Glaive – the first flying-spinny-bladed death weapon Hollywood called a ‘Glaive’. Which makes the earlier (by one year) Beastmaster scissor-hatchet the Ur-Glaive. Near-practicality aside, be glad this came along – otherwise you’d have been talking about Blade’s Shredder Caber.